Chat with Deb—Off to Denali!
Life would be so much easier if we could actually hear the ominous background music
Previously, on Deb & Jack’s Alaska Adventure:
This is the day we debarked from Nieuw Amsterdam and took a bus up to Denali National Park. All of our stuff that we did not need for the park had already been picked up; we’d see it in Anchorage, the night before we get on the plane to head home. So we just packed a couple days of stuff in our carry-on suitcases (which would go on a separate bus to meet us in Denali). I had kept some of my stuff in the bed stand on my side of the bed.
ME: I felt a little funny with my sleep shorts in the drawer with the Gideon Bible. I should’ve moved the book into your drawer. You’re a PK¹ so —
DEB: So I don’t need it. (looks at me with a gotcha look; licks her finger, touches it to her butt, and makes a sizzle sound) Now THAT is a comment to Linda!²
During the night we’ve arrived in Whittier, AK, a nice little port. Holland America Lines (HAL) had everything prepped and ready for us to debark and board our buses (half of us) or train (the other half).
So we sadly said goodbye to our lovely cabin and our nice ship, and took our remaining bags with us to check in to our bus. Boarding went smoothly.
ME: Um… did you hear the guy behind us?
DEB: Sorry, I was putting our stuff in the overhead storage. Why?
ME: He complained to his wife that “they should have let the white people on first instead of all these orientals.” Said it twice. No hint of irony.
DEB: (after checking around the rest of the bus) And they took off their masks. But so have most of the passengers. (Deb & I kept our cloth masks on.)
ME: Except, oddly enough, the Asian-looking passengers.
DEB: Culture thing, honey.
To get out of Whittier, the road and railroad went through a tunnel. One lane, including the train track, so first the train went, then the road traffic. One direction on the hour, the opposite direction on the half-hour. About 2½ miles long, and traffic was spaced out by a red/green light.
DEB: That went very well! I guess everyone knows the rules.
We drove through the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Nice city, but it looks like any city in the lower 48 states, picked at random. Pleasant to live in, but nothing special to visit. At least the part we drove through.
Meanwhile, our fellow passengers were coughing, wheezing, and sneezing. A lot. Never mind COVID-19, I worried about colds and flu! I was thinking we should shift to our N95 masks, but that might be overreacting.³
We stopped for lunch (oh good, a chance to get away from our racist disease-spreading fellow passengers!) and then continued north. A couple hours after lunch, we stopped at a rest stop. On the one hand, it was fairly large; on the other hand, only a couple restrooms were open. Or, more importantly, shoveled out. Deb waited to use the ladies room, I wandered around.
DEB: (joining me to stretch our legs by a walk around the parking lot, which was the only cleared section) Okay, that was really more of an outhouse than a proper bathroom. No running water, not even hand sanitizer. What did you find?
ME: There is a veterans memorial thing over there, but nobody cleared it, and even if I had boots the snow is knee-deep. Apparently there are markers for the five services. You know, Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force, and Spaaaaace Fooooorce.
DEB: They have something for Space Force already?
ME: I have no idea. I just like having a branch of the military that’s easier to make fun of than the Air Force⁴.
We eventually got to the resort. First impressions were good. The McKinley⁵ Chalet Resort is a sprawling group of buildings over a wide area; there were resort shuttles, or we could just walk. We were in the Canyon Lodge, maybe a quarter mile away. Since our heavier bags would be in our rooms at this point, and we’d just been sitting most of the day, we walked. Plus we’d been told that not everybody’s room might be quite ready yet.
And found chaos when we got there. “Not quite ready yet” was a correct assessment, in the same way that a bag of flour, a bag of sugar, and a carton of eggs was “not quite a cake yet.” The hallways were strewn with housekeeping carts, laundry carts, and piles of dirty laundry. Our room reflected that — the beds had been partially stripped, with the dirty sheets still on top, and the bathroom was strewn with used towels. We stashed our hand-carry stuff in the empty closet and went looking for something to do while we kept out of the way.
As we passed through the building lobby, one of our fellow passengers was unloading his deep dissatisfaction on someone from housekeeping who (based on attire) was not in a management position and unable to do more than offer apologies without any power to fix anything.
ME: Lesson learned from my paternal grandmother: never dump on the junior help, start as high up as you can. Grandma Herlocker would have started with “May I speak to your manager, please?”, then followed up with “May I speak to your manager, please?” until she got far enough up the food chain that she had someone who could actually do something. And she never raised her voice or showed she was upset, which I suspect was probably scarier to the object of her attention.⁶
DEB: Well, it’s a little early for dinner, but we might as well check out one of the restaurants. According to the map there are four.
The four restaurants turned out to be three and a dinner theater; the three turned out to be two and a coffee shop; the two turned out to be one that was open and one that still had tables stacked for out-of-season storage. Okay, fine, we’d take what we could get.
We walked around a little more, both to see what was around and to walk off our dinner. We met a group coming from the Princess⁸ resort area next door; they did not have any functional food places, so the staff there had sent them to McKinley. They stopped at a pizza place on the way, only it had run out of pizza. We had to break it to them that only one restaurant in McKinley was actually open.
Fingers crossed, we headed back to our lodge room. Some rooms were still in progress, but ours was ready — and our bags were there! Fresh linen, fresh towels, our clean underwear and tooth brushes… all’s right with the world.
DEB: There’s a note from management… they apologize for the confusion, their system broke down and they were not notified that people were arriving today. As an apology, there are two $25 vouchers for goods and services at the lodge, so with the first two $25 vouchers from HAL we now have $100 worth. Okay, I know how we’re paying for breakfast!
ME: Wait… we knew when we’d becoming here months ago. HAP failed to prep the rooms because they didn’t get an email? Something else is off here. Did you notice there were maybe three people working on rooms? Including that poor guy who was getting yelled at by one of our fellow passenger jerks?
DEB: You’re thinking they don’t have enough staff to handle everything?
ME: That would make sense. (looking around) Where is that ominous background music coming from?
¹PK = preacher’s kid; Deb’s dad was a Presbyterian pastor.
²Linda, my ex-wife, is also a PK. Yes, the two get on very well.
³Later on I would regret that decision. <cue ominous background music>
⁴Why yes, I was in the Navy. What gave me away?
⁵Mount Denali used to be Mount McKinley; before that it was Mount Denali. Apparently changing the name of the resort was too hard.
⁶Grandma Herlocker died when I was little, but I heard stories from my mother, who was totally mortified while traveling with her new MIL before I was born. My mother was born into a country farm family, who didn’t make trouble; Grandma Herlocker was born into the 1%⁷ and never lost that attitude.
⁷The money almost totally disappeared during the Great Depression, being entirely invested in real estate development, so I was raised upper middle class with stories of the Good Old Days.
⁸Princess Cruise Lines and HAL are owned by the same parent company; the shore facilities, we later found, are run by Holland America Princess (HAP), and the two cruise lines share.
Next: Oh the weather outside is frightful, and inside isn’t all that great either.
